March Madness: The story behind the man with the last remaining perfect NCAA bracket

By Kevin Stankiewicz kstankiewicz@dispatch.com

Tuesday

Mar 26, 2019 at 3:42 PMMar 26, 2019 at 3:42 PM

Gregg Nigl almost didn’t fill out his March Madness bracket on NCAA.com’s “Bracket Challenge.”

Now, he’s made history.

Nigl, 40 of Columbus, Ohio, has a perfect bracket through 48 games, the most games in a row that someone has ever correctly predicted in NCAA.com’s tournament challenge.

He learned about his perfect bracket Monday night, when a reporter tracked him down.

“We couldn’t believe it. My wife (Casandra) was sitting next to me and I had it on speaker phone,” Nigl said. “I kept asking, ‘How do I know this is not a joke?’ ”

He got on his computer, “saw my bracket and it was all green. It was pretty wild.”

It’s pretty unlikely, too. The odds of a perfect bracket are up for debate. Some say it’s 1 in 9.2 quintillion. Others say it’s 1 in 2.4 trillion. Another estimate is 1 in 2 billion.

Whatever the actual odds, the point is that picking all 63 NCAA Tournament games correctly is ridiculously improbable. In all the major online tournament challenges, no one has ever done it — even if, as Jim Carrey asked in “Dumb and Dumber,” “So you’re saying there’s a chance?”

Nigl, at this point, is as close as anyone has gotten (In 2010, someone also made it to the Sweet 16 with a perfect bracket intact, but CBS never verified it).

On Thursday morning, hours before the deadline to submit brackets, Nigl was sick and lying in bed. A neuropsychologist for the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs in Columbus, Nigl called off work.

He was about to go back to sleep but said he would’ve felt bad if he didn’t enter a bracket in his friend’s tournament group.

“I was half asleep and sick,” he said.

He filled it out anyways. Now he’s 48 for 48.

Nigl, who has lived in Columbus for 10 years, admits there is luck involved, but he’s also a college basketball fan who wasn’t mindless about making his picks.

While he watches mostly Big Ten games during the season, Nigl said he did his homework after the tournament field was unveiled, including watching some of the bracketology shows on TV.

In addition to his historic bracket, two of Nigl’s other three brackets are in first place in their groups.

His third, which was heavy on upset picks, hasn’t fared as well in a tournament in which 12 of the 16 remaining teams are either No. 1, 2 and 3 seeds.

In his perfect bracket, Nigl has No. 1 Gonzaga beating No. 2 Kentucky for the national title. Duke and Virginia round out his Final Four.

Nigl has been watching the games closely. In fact, while on a trip, he and his wife made a pit stop at a brewery in Erie, Pa., to watch Michigan play Florida in the Round of 32. Nigl, who grew up in Michigan, is a lifelong Wolverines fan.

While Nigl likes how he picked the remaining games, he isn’t counting on his bracket to stay perfect.

“Seeing the odds of a perfect bracket up until this point, I’m not very confident that it will stay that way,” Nigl said. “But anything can happen.”